Third Harbour Crossing

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by someone123

People often complain about negativity and defeatism in Halifax unjustifiably, but I think this is a clear case where the city's culture is having a real negative impact on a lot of people.

The city will soon be twice as big as it was when the last bridge was built. A third crossing is needed and it's a realistic project. It can be put off, but only at the expense of longer commutes, lost economic activity, and likely even worse sprawl if people end up moving farther out on the Halifax side because they want to avoid the crossing.

We went through a period of too much highway construction but now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. There is still sometimes a need for new roads and bridges. It's also wrong to imagine road and bridge construction as zero sum with respect to transit; most transit in Halifax uses roads! The plan for the third bridge includes a bus lane each way.

Agree, this is long overdue. Also, wouldn't this qualify for provincial and federal funding?

That said, just about anytime anybody mentions spending money on road infrastructure here there seems to be multiple complaints that it's a waste of tax money because we shouldn't be driving cars or something like that - I'm almost afraid to comment on this topic as I'll be accused being a greedy, lazy 'boomer' who wants everything his way.

Errrr... hopefully a new bridge would have large bicycle lanes!

[Keith P.]

A third bridge is an absolute necessity and since it is financed by toll revenue Mr. May's "we can't afford it" litany is non sequitur.

Unfortunately the south end elite in Halifax will use everything in their bag of tricks to scuttle this since it would land in their neighborhood. And our political weathervane Mayor and Council have already said they do not wish to discuss it Shameful.

[halifaxboyns]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

A third bridge is an absolute necessity and since it is financed by toll revenue Mr. May's "we can't afford it" litany is non sequitur.

Unfortunately the south end elite in Halifax will use everything in their bag of tricks to scuttle this since it would land in their neighborhood. And our political weathervane Mayor and Council have already said they do not wish to discuss it Shameful.

I seem to recall that Mayor Savage himself said he didn't support a 3rd bridge as well. My feeling is that it's going to be needed at some point; whether we like it or not because we will eventually have to replace the MacDonald - leaving only one bridge during that time would be a nightmare.

In terms of the south end; I have no sympathy for them. I suspect if it was a tunnel; there would be a little less opposition because depending on how the access points would work (I recall a report that former Councillor Uteck had put down at Council showing the tunnel having access points on Robie between South/Inglis and then one near the Westin).

Frankly; my only comment would be that if a 3rd crossing is needed (and assuming it's a tunnel) it should only be built if there is a second set of tunnels for transit only (that can be a combination of LRT/Bus tunnel like the one in Seattle with proper safety controls). This way, we could begin pre-planning for a LRT into downtown that would run through the office core, then the train station, out to Woodside and then down Portland Street to Forest Hills Parkway. That is the busiest bus corridor in the City at this point and the uplift in density with redeveloping all that commercial corridor would help pay down some of the debt of building an LRT.

But if it's just a tunnel - no provision for transit; then I wouldn't support building it.

[hfx_chris]

Since you mentioned Portland Street and Cole Harbour to downtown Halifax being busy, I will note that Metro Transit has recently expanded the Woodside Ferry service to 15-minutes during rush hour, and added two express routes from Cole Harbour (Ashgrove Ave) and from Mount Edward (Flying Cloud Dr) to the Woodside terminal. I'm a bit disappointed in the mornings to see the 78 from Mount Edward nearly empty, and the same in the afternoons. Yet the buses are packed from Portland Hills and Penhorn straight to downtown. I do realize ridership on new routes often takes time to materialize.
With the route 90 now on the Halifax side there's a connection between the ferry terminal and the south end/universities area, however I don't understand why there isn't a proper downtown/south end shuttle yet, hitting both universities and the hospital district, as well as the ferry terminal.
Sorry, I'm digressing.

[Drybrain]

I generally agree with the left-of-centre progressive planning community on these issues, but I find the opposition to a third crossing absolutely baffling. While we definitely need to move the city to less car-oriented ways of transport, we're simply never going to get people commuting across the harbour in such numbers that it makes a major dent in cross-harbour traffic. (And I say this as a cycle commuter who thinks we should be building bike lanes all over the place). Likewise, carpooling is nice, but it's not likely to be adopted in enormous numbers voluntarily, unfortunately. Actually, a third crossing could make carpooling MORE desirable, if it includes plans for an HOV lane.

In fact, we have to sell the idea of a third crossing as not being primarily about single-occupancy vehicles at all. It will be one benefit, but the main thing is to provide faster, better transit infrastructure into downtown. A crossing from Woodside to Halterm, for example, can include generous cycling/pedestrian lanes and most importantly, an HOV lane for carpools, taxis and transit vehicles. With the added auto capacity, a lane of auto traffic on MacKay could be removed and also replaced with an HOV lane, and transit vehicles could run much more quickly and reliably in and out of the city centre on the north and south sides, making transit a more desirable option.

Also, if a harbour crossing is built connecting Woodside with the south end container terminal, maybe the city can stipulate that transport trucks coming and going from the terminal must leave the peninsula rather than traversing the downtown. This, possibly, is also a way to sell it to residents who may be wary of a crossing into their end of town. Halifax needs to get all these flatbed truck and tractor-trailers out of downtown. They're noisy, huge, dangerous, they're massive traffic obstacles, and they're unpleasant to be around. It definitely gives the city a gritty working-port vibe, but not in a good way--more in a "The livability of our urban environment isn't important enough to keep it clear of block-long 18-wheelers" way.

Finally: The city has one of the lowest proportions of its office space downtown of any major city in the country. That's bad, but it also means there's a lot of potential to improve. If we're successful in bringing more office employment downtown--not to mention more residents, which definitely is happening--the need for more transportation capacity into downtown will grow much faster than the city's overall population.

Coming from bigger cities, Halifax's bridge congestion doesn't feel that bad to me, yet. But it's getting worse, and there are all sorts of reasons to address it, both for the present and to ensure future capacity--especially for an improved, faster, better transit system.

[Colin May]

Originally Posted by someone123

$1.5 billion is not a large long-term project for a city like London. This project is expected to cost about $25B: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

You are talking about $1.5 billion that can be partially paid for by the users and that will be used to build a piece of infrastructure useful for 50 years or longer.

Over 30 million trips take place over the bridges each year. Imagine 15 million for the new bridge (probably conservative in the long run). Over 50 years that works out to 750,000,000 trips. $1.5 billion works out to a $2 cost per trip. It is easily worth spending $2 to save 10 minutes on a commute. Many people would spend much more than that.

These expenses always need to be put into context. All too frequently people get caught up on large cost numbers without accounting for the fact that the value they provide affects a large number of people for a large period of time.

The number of vehicles using the 2 bridges is 33.5 million per annum and has been steady at that level for the past 3 years.
The bridge renewal starting next year will cost $200 million.
If a 3rd bridge costs $1.5 billion the province would have to borrow the money.
On October 21 2014 the province borrowed $200 million for 30 years at a rate of 3.5%
Assuming the same rate was available for a new bridge the annual interest charge would be $52.5 million.
Toll revenue in 2013/14 was $31.576 million down from $31.892 in 2012/13 - a drop of 1%.
Draw your own conclusion.

http://www.hdbc.ca/wp-content/upload...ual-Report.pdf

http://www.novascotia.ca/finance/sit...ct_21_2014.pdf

[someone123]

When a route is heavily congested at rush hour you're not going to see the throughput go up much, if at all, over time. The two bridges simply can't go to 50, 60, 70 million cars a year as they are presently configured. The net difference between what the bridges could carry without congestion and what they do carry represents lost economic activity; people are commuting less efficiently as a result of that.

Normally there is cost sharing with at least the federal government; the final deal would probably involve some provincial funding, some federal, and some user-pay. The original estimation for the bridge was $1.1B. Your calculations assuming $1.5B to be financed entirely by the provincial government are enormously inflated. On top of that there are spinoff benefits from large projects in terms of job creation and new tax revenues. If you don't take those into account you are under-valuing just about every government project.

I think overall conservatism when it comes to public works and a consequent of lack cost-sharing deals with the federal government is one reason why NS and Halifax specifically have suffered from sluggish economic development with respect to other parts of the country. Other places build more aggressively and therefore participate more fully in federal cost-sharing programs, while Halifax sits out because people there are resistant to change. It is terrible because people there get poorer infrastructure for their tax dollar and fewer economic spinoffs.

[hokus83]

A 3rd bridge would also create a incentive for higher residential density for eastern passage and Downtown dartmouth. I think one of the problems though is that it would have to pass over Georges Island if it were contact from the 111 to south street, thats not something I would or many other people would be in favor for. Does anyone know of any bridges in any other cities that pass over a island that is a National Historic Site.

[Colin May]

Originally Posted by someone123

When a route is heavily congested at rush hour you're not going to see the throughput go up much, if at all, over time. The two bridges simply can't go to 50, 60, 70 million cars a year as they are presently configured. The net difference between what the bridges could carry without congestion and what they do carry represents lost economic activity; people are commuting less efficiently as a result of that.

Normally there is cost sharing with at least the federal government; the final deal would probably involve some provincial funding, some federal, and some user-pay. The original estimation for the bridge was $1.1B. Your calculations assuming $1.5B to be financed entirely by the provincial government are enormously inflated. On top of that there are spinoff benefits from large projects in terms of job creation and new tax revenues. If you don't take those into account you are under-valuing just about every government project.

I think overall conservatism when it comes to public works and a consequent of lack cost-sharing deals with the federal government is one reason why NS and Halifax specifically have suffered from sluggish economic development with respect to other parts of the country. Other places build more aggressively and therefore participate more fully in federal cost-sharing programs, while Halifax sits out because people there are resistant to change. It is terrible because people there get poorer infrastructure for their tax dollar and fewer economic spinoffs.

I have the impression you don't like numbers.
Reduce the cost to $1 billion and assume the feds kick in $500 million in a province of less than 1 million people in a country of 36 million.
The math tells you that the feds would be spending $18 billion in the whole country if all the money for the province was devoted to the bridge or $36 billion if the bridge was half of the money spent in NS.

The interest costs would be reduced by a third to $17.5 million a year

A new bridge from Woodside would result in significant sprawl to the east of Dartmouth and the defeat the desire to encourage growth in the urban core. Make it easier and quicker to get to work and people will live further away from the core on larger lots in cheaper homes; creating greater demand for schools, rec centres, libraries etc.
Spending more doesn't mean the feds give you more, they dispense the money based on population.
Did you read the HDBC annual report ?
Where do you get the numbers for 50-70 million cars a year - a wild guess or something more substantial ?

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Colin May

The interest costs would be reduced by a third to $17.5 million a year

Not down by a third, but down to a third of your $52.5M estimate above. That substantial difference is what I was talking about.

Federal government funding follows all sorts of different formulas. Some transfers are based on need, sometimes money's apportioned by provincial population, and sometimes it's granted to projects deemed most worthwhile. There isn't a guarantee that every province or municipality receives the same overall funding per capita and that isn't how it works out. I don't know about the last couple of years, but for a while Halifax was dead last in terms of per capita federal and provincial infrastructure funding in Canadian metropolitan areas. One or two ambitious building projects qualifying for something like Economic Action Plan funding would have changed that significantly.

[TheNovaScotian]

The statistics about our funding are painful to realize, We've made a history of being a disorganized mess haha. Went without a central library until the 1950's and now we have 2!

Since the "Big Dig" in Boston, the common practice that would be used is to submerge sections of a tunnel in a modularized way. We'd have to dredge a good section around the middle but the depth is quiet deep on both sides.
Colin, in the classical sense of sprawl this might look like it would encourage it but Woodside is an already serviced part of the city.

Big thinking to me would be to plan an LRT line along the Circ, crossing at this tunnel taking the LRT through the railway cut all the way out the Windsor St. exchange and along to Bedford and completing the circuit in Burnside.
The most ambitious part is to turn the railway cut into a multi-leveled transit corridor mostly for freight and the LRT. The way to sell it to most of the residents would be to dig down some and fill the whole section to grade. Through design it could dampen sound, even let them plant community gardens and bike/walking trails on top

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by Colin May

A new bridge from Woodside would result in significant sprawl to the east of Dartmouth and the defeat the desire to encourage growth in the urban core. Make it easier and quicker to get to work and people will live further away from the core on larger lots in cheaper homes; creating greater demand for for schools, rec centres, libraries etc,

One could also make the alternate argument that making it easier to get to the centre of the city would encourage people to do so.

I'm also not sure a bridge would encourage a lot of sprawl beyond Dartmouth—once you're east of Dartmouth, it doesn't really matter which harbour crossing you take, in terms of time spent driving to the bridge. It might boost land values or encourage intensification in Eastern Passage and Cole Harbour, but that's probably a good thing. These are already well within the built-up urban area, and in fact, given their proximity to the peninsula, are ideal candidates for suburban densification in decades to come, once we've infilled the peninsula more thoroughly.

I also think we can rely largely on changing residential preferences to boost populations in the core. (If you look at recent housing starts, they're heavily weighted to multi-unit buildings in the urban core. Single-family is way down.)

In any case, it's definitely a losing battle to try and trick people into living downtown by depriving the city of important long-term infrastructure. I do understand the concerns about sprawl, and they're the same concerns I have about rapid transit: If we make it easy to scoot around the city via LRT on a ROW, I think we can expect a lot of people to decide they want to live at the end of the line. Does that mean we shouldn't build a rapid-transit system? Of course not.

There's a long history of such expansion facilitating sprawl—in the 19th and early 20th century, cities from Vancouver to Toronto to Halifax were building streetcar lines into the countryside to encourage growth. Should we do that? Definitely not, but building a bridge from the centre of the city to an adjacent and populated commuter suburb is not the same thing.

It'd be much easier of we could just implement a Portland-style growth boundary and be done with it.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by hokus83

A 3rd bridge would also create a incentive for higher residential density for eastern passage and Downtown dartmouth. I think one of the problems though is that it would have to pass over Georges Island if it were contact from the 111 to south street, thats not something I would or many other people would be in favor for. Does anyone know of any bridges in any other cities that pass over a island that is a National Historic Site.

Not an island, but the Bathurst Street bridge in Toronto passes directly over Fort York. Not that that's an example to emulate—it's an extremely shabby way to treat the birthplace of the city.

It would actually be pretty terrible to connect it at South Street—huge traffic dump, and it'd screw up the market area terribly. Would be better to jog it south, bypass the island, and connect with Marginal Road, to the south of the Pier 21. If possible.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by hokus83

A 3rd bridge would also create a incentive for higher residential density for eastern passage and Downtown dartmouth. I think one of the problems though is that it would have to pass over Georges Island if it were contact from the 111 to south street, thats not something I would or many other people would be in favor for. Does anyone know of any bridges in any other cities that pass over a island that is a National Historic Site.

What is the historical significance of Georges Island? Did it save Halifax from invasion? Since it is off-limits most of the time I fail to see why it should not begin to serve some useful purpose.

Regardless, if the local do-nothing groups threaten to blow it up in protest over that, then simply create an artificial island from rock (we have lots) next to it.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

With the added auto capacity, a lane of auto traffic on MacKay could be removed and also replaced with an HOV lane, and transit vehicles could run much more quickly and reliably in and out of the city centre on the north and south sides, making transit a more desirable option.

I don't see this as being a good idea, as the MacKay serves a completely different part of the city than a new third crossing would. I don't think it's practical to think that increasing access to the south end with a third crossing would significantly decrease traffic on the MacKay to make an HOV lane functional without creating a situation where one lane remains essentially unused while the other bottlnecks.

I've said this before, if you want to improve traffic and transit use, the best way to do it is to improve transit such that transit makes the commute more convenient for the public, rather than enforcing draconian rules to force them into submission.

My thoughts are to increase capacity by adding a third crossing, make sure that transit and active transportation receive equal priority to motor vehicle transportation on the new crossing, and leave the others as is. The new crossing will definitely take traffic from the Macdonald, which in turn might take some traffic from the MacKay. This is a win-win for everybody IMHO.

While we're at it, perhaps a bridge with two deck levels should be planned right from the getgo. One level for motor vehicle traffic and the other level for transit and active transportation - work LRT into the formula and we would really have something here.

I definitely agree that the spinoffs benefits to the downtown business area would far outweigh any potential detriments.

[OldDartmouthMark]

One more thing I'd like to add is that being a smaller area, even rush-hour traffic is typically never that bad compared to big cities. However, with the configuration of the peninsula all it takes is a stalled vehicle or accident in a key location to totally gridlock traffic at every bottleneck in town. A third crossing would definitely help alleviate that situation.

[Colin May]

Originally Posted by someone123

Not down by a third, but down to a third of your $52.5M estimate above. That substantial difference is what I was talking about.

Federal government funding follows all sorts of different formulas. Some transfers are based on need, sometimes money's apportioned by provincial population, and sometimes it's granted to projects deemed most worthwhile. There isn't a guarantee that every province or municipality receives the same overall funding per capita and that isn't how it works out. I don't know about the last couple of years, but for a while Halifax was dead last in terms of per capita federal and provincial infrastructure funding in Canadian metropolitan areas. One or two ambitious building projects qualifying for something like Economic Action Plan funding would have changed that significantly.

My proof reading needs to be improved.
But the numbers remain unchanged.
Annual revenue is $32 million and has been close to that for several years.
A new $1 billion bridge will have a minimum annual interest cost of $17.5 plus operating and maintenance costs.
Therefore the annual revenue must increase by at least 55%.
Does that mean higher tolls on a new bridge, or higher tolls on all 3 bridges, or
higher tolls at rush hours ?

[pblaauw]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

What is the historical significance of Georges Island? Did it save Halifax from invasion? Since it is off-limits most of the time I fail to see why it should not begin to serve some useful purpose.

Wikipedia article on the history on Georges Island.

[swimmer_spe]

A few thoughts.

1) If it wasn't for the Halifax Explosion, HRM would be about the size of Boston.

2) City planning is needed. Do not allow single family homes, have higher density homes, and condos. Then, the demand for a LRT would exist, and be viable.

3) Building a third crossing makes sense. Should be 3 lanes each way, plus double track for LRT. Build a highway over the cut. Connect it to 102 and the MacKay Bridge.

Dartmouth is easier to drive than Halifax.

[worldlyhaligonian]

Originally Posted by swimmer_spe

A few thoughts.

1) If it wasn't for the Halifax Explosion, HRM would be about the size of Boston.

2) City planning is needed. Do not allow single family homes, have higher density homes, and condos. Then, the demand for a LRT would exist, and be viable.

3) Building a third crossing makes sense. Should be 3 lanes each way, plus double track for LRT. Build a highway over the cut. Connect it to 102 and the MacKay Bridge.

Dartmouth is easier to drive than Halifax.

IF you want number 2, vote for pro-height candidates in the next municipal election.